They Killed Ken!

kwings writes "SF Gate (via the AP) is reporting that your pal, Ken Jennings has been beaten after his 75th(!) game. I fully expect Mr. Trebek to hold a wake, or to keep calling the champion 'Ken' for the rest of the season. :) Since they're only up to airing game 41, it will be an interesting few months (or 34 shows)."

Comments

I think they should give Ken Alex's job.

[Anonymous Coward]

More people watch Jepordy because of Ken; and he's certainly entertaining.

I think it'd be cool if the host actually knew all the stuff when interacting with the contestants.

Re:I think they should give Ken Alex's job.

[BuzzLY]

Perhaps he is intelligent... but he's an asshole.

Quoted from http://www.eonline.com/News/Items/0,1,6216,00.html :

It also may be that Trebek is too tied up with potential court dates to appear on the show. The 59-year-old host was sued Monday by a United Airlines employee, who says he left her with serious hand injuries during a confrontation at Los Angeles International Airport.

Marlene Andrade, 31, of Hawthorne, California, claims Trebek got irate last May when she said his carry-on luggage was too big for the plane. She allegedly asked him to place his bag through a metal template at the front of an X-ray machine to test whether it was too big. She claims Trebek lifted the hinged plate and began passing the luggage through anyway. "He said... 'Don't you know who I am?' " says Andrade's lawyer, Steven Lerman. "And she said, 'I don't care who you are, these are the rules.' "

Andrade alleges that Trebek then slammed the plate down on her hands, and she's seeking unspecified damages for the incident. Trebek has declined to comment on the matter, pending ongoing litigation.

Bummer.

[keiferb]

You know, my local radio station's morning guys were reporting that he had lost on like... day 15 of his streak. They obviously were accounting for the pre-taping and all, but I'm glad to see he keeps going.

Jeopardy just won't be as fun to watch after he's gone. Ken's converted Jeopardy from an interesting game-show to a serious spectator sport in my house. It just won't be the same.

Re:Bummer.

[ch-chuck]

No doubt the ratings have shot thru the roof, as well as the advertising revenue. Makes me wonder if it was somehow rigged to achieve that end.

Jeopardy rules

[jeffkjo1]

Jeopardy rules essentially state that if a contestant leaks the results of a match before it has aired, that they forfeit their winnings. While this story may be true, someone's head will roll for it.

Re:Jeopardy rules

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a catchphrase which seemed to arise out of nowhere and yet has had a long period of fashion and is still going strong. It's known mainly in Britain and Commonwealth countries, and is really a kind of interjection. It's used to show how simple it is to do something: "You put the plug in here, press that switch, and Bob's your uncle!".

The most attractive theory--albeit suspiciously neat--is that it derives from a prolonged act of political nepotism. The Victorian prime minister, Lord Salisbury (family name Robert Cecil, pronounced ) appointed his rather less than popular nephew Arthur Balfour to a succession of posts. The most controversial, in 1887, was chief secretary of Ireland, a post for which Balfour--despite his intellectual gifts--was considered unsuitable. The Dictionary of National Biography says: "The country saw with something like stupefaction the appointment of the young dilettante to what was at the moment perhaps the most important, certainly the most anxious office in the administration". As the story goes, the consensus among the irreverent in Britain was that to have Bob as your uncle was a guarantee of success, hence the expression. Since the very word nepotism derives from the Italian word for nephew (from the practice of Italian popes giving preferment to nephews, a euphemism for their bastard sons), the association here seems more than apt.

Actually, Balfour did rather well in the job, confounding his critics and earning the bitter nickname Bloody Balfour from the Irish, which must have quietened the accusations of undue favouritism more than a little (he also rose to be Prime Minister from 1902-5). There is another big problem: the phrase isn't recorded until 1937, in Eric Partridge's Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English. Mr Partridge suggested it had been in use since the 1890s, but nobody has found an example in print. This is surprising. If public indignation or cynicism against Lord Salisbury's actions had been great enough to provoke creation of the saying, why didn't it appear--to take a case--in a satirical magazine of the time such as Punch?

A rather more probable, but less exciting, theory has it that it derives from the slang phrase all is bob, meaning that everything is safe, pleasant or satisfactory. This dates back to the seventeenth century or so (it's in Captain Francis Grose's Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue of 1785). There have been several other slang expressions containing bob, some associated with thievery or gambling, and from the eighteenth century on it was also a common generic name for somebody you didn't know. Any or all of these might have contributed to its genesis.

Don't count on it

[Kombat]

Remember when someone "hacked" CBS's website and learned that Gervase was the winner? The next 2 weeks were boring, as we all knew the rest of the game was a foregone conclusion - until Gervase got voted off, and we all realized we'd been had.

Ken's winning streak has been fantastic for Jeopardy's ratings (up 35% from the same time last season, last I heard). This could be just another ploy to try and drive the ratings up even further.

Come on, guys. We're notorious skeptics here on Slashdot. Don't believe everything you read.

Re:that was a good run though

[LiquidCoooled]

Well, they say (again in the article) that the most recent aired show was his 41st win, and that he had $1,380,661.

Now, if this news is right that his final curtain closes on show 75, its roughly on course.

It had to end sometime

[Xentax]

Assuming this speculation is true, the real question is "how".

I mean, I'm sure even Ken would/will/did get tired of playing sooner or later. 75 games sounds like a nice round number to stop on; he set the single-game score record with something right around 75,000, as I recall (maybe even 75k even?).

So, it'll be interesting (to me) to see if he more or less quit on purpose - either just not coming back by choice, or obviously throwing the game to lose.

Xentax

Re:The losing Final Jeopardy question of Ken Jenni

[Peyna]

I wouldn't call TV Week the most credible news source in the world; however, I think the more interesting part of this is that it appears TV Week blatantly ripped off the info from this guys blog (while one news source gave him credit, and didn't at all state it as fact). Then the AP and a few other news outlets picked it up from TV Week and it spread like wildfire.

I think TV Week should be called out on this one, because clearly their source is the blog, and the blog's source is a named informer; however, they way their article is written, they make it appear that the source went directly to them. This is good for them, because it makes it look like they have people "on the inside" that are willing to give them information.

When the NY Times can have a plagiarizer on their staff for a long time without knowing it, I do not think I would put such actions behind a much less credible periodical as TV Week.

Doesn't add up

[yjchung]

They only began taping the new season in August. They managed to tape 38 shows already?